Astro Starter Kit: Minimal

The Astro Starter Kit: Minimal is an official boilerplate from the Astro team that creates a blank Astro project with a single index.astro page, intended as the smallest possible starting point for building a site with the Astro framework.

What is the Astro Starter Kit: Minimal?

The Astro Starter Kit: Minimal is the official starter template from the withastro/astro repository, designed to give you a bare Astro project structure. It takes the Astro framework and produces a minimal project skeleton containing a public/ directory, a src/pages/ directory with one index.astro page, and a package.json file. It runs on Node.js using npm commands and is maintained by the Astro team.

Key Features

• Single page structure — The template contains exactly one page (src/pages/index.astro) plus an empty public/ directory and package.json; no extra components, styling, or integrations are included.
• File-based routing — Any .astro or .md file added to src/pages/ becomes a route whose URL matches the file name, per the Astro documentation.
• Component flexibility — The template is ready for components written in Astro, React, Vue, Svelte, or Preact inside src/components/, though none are preinstalled.
• Static asset folder — The public/ directory is the designated place for images and other static files.
• Local dev server — npm run dev starts a development server at localhost:4321 with hot reload.
• Production build — npm run build outputs a static site to the ./dist/ folder; npm run preview lets you test that build locally.
• CLI access — The npm run astro command runs Astro CLI tools such as astro add and astro check.
• One-command setup — Run npm create astro@latest -- --template minimal to scaffold a new project.

Who is it for?

• New Astro developers who want a minimal, uncluttered codebase to learn how Astro handles pages, routing, and builds.
• Developers building a custom site who prefer to start from a blank slate and add their own framework integrations, styles, and components.
• Developers testing Astro features who need a tiny project to reproduce issues or experiment with the Astro CLI.

What can you do with it?

• Build a static marketing page: create additional .astro or .md files in src/pages/ and let file-based routing generate the URLs.
• Try out component frameworks: add React, Vue, Svelte, or Preact components in src/components/ and use them from Astro pages.
• Set up a continuous deployment pipeline: since npm run build produces a static ./dist/ folder, you can deploy the output to any static host.

How does it work?

The setup workflow: run the create command, then npm install to install dependencies, npm run dev to preview, and npm run build to generate the static output in ./dist/.

FAQ

Is the Astro Starter Kit: Minimal free?

Yes — it is the official starter from the open-source withastro/astro repository, so there is no license fee to use or modify it.

What pages are included?

Only one page, src/pages/index.astro, which renders a simple placeholder welcome screen telling you to delete the content and start building.

Does it include a CSS framework or UI library?

No. The minimal template has no styling system, no integrations, and no preinstalled components — you add whatever you want.

Can I use it with React or Vue?

Yes. The template is framework-agnostic: you can install the official Astro integration for React, Vue, Svelte, or Preact and place components in src/components/.

What is the default port for the dev server?

The dev server runs at localhost:4321.